Related Stories

Rhythm of life Millennium dance-floor hit, Disco Science, is better than Achy Breaky Heart for helping victims of heart attacks, but neither meets the grade for inclusion in first-aid guidelines, a new study has found.

Rhythmic music has been long been suggested as a tool for medical workers learning cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

Healthcare workers in Britain were once advised to recall a quirky 1950s children's song Nellie the Elephant, in order to get the right rhythm of chest compression.

In a macabre twist, their counterparts in the United States experimented at one point with the Bee Gees' 1970s pointy-finger disco hit, Stayin' Alive.

While the songs do help maintain the right rate of 100 chest compressions a minute, it doesn't help to provide the right compression depth of five to six centimetres, the researchers reported in Emergency Medicine Journal .

Keen to explore the link between backbeat and heartbeat, the team of Australian and UK researchers led by Dr Malcolm Woollard from Coventry University, carried out an experiment on the sidelines of a conference of Australian paramedics.

Seventy-four volunteers delivered CPR to a dummy as they listened on headphones either to Billy Ray Cyrus' 1992 country hit Achy Breaky Heart or Mirwais' Disco Science, or heard no music at all.

Fast but not deep

The reseachers found Disco Science came out tops in terms of meeting the compression rate.

Eighty-two percent of those who listened to it got within the optimal range of 100 to 120 compressions per minute, compared to 64 percent for Achy Breaky Heart and 65 percent for no music at all.

Even so, regardless of the music, a third of compressions were still too shallow and more than 50 per cent of the volunteers adopted the wrong hand positions.

Disco Science was a little bit more effective which surprised us. We didn't actually think it would be in terms of the rate, but it didn't help the compressions in terms of the shallowness or the depth," says study co-author Professor Peter O'Meara from Latrobe University.

"So as much as it was a lot of fun we think we should probably give it a miss now."

Given the combined importance of correct depth and rate of compression, the researchers are not convinced that music is the best guide for CPR, and suggest that a metronome or some other audio gadget may be better.